We screamed. We cried. We ate a hot dog (or five).
A complete and faithful account of what is about to happen to you.
Can an itinerary capture an event so completely life-changing? Read on and agree see.
I had resigned myself to planning a mediocre bachelor party. The odds of true greatness had seemed too steep. And then—a vision. A revelation. A Google Maps route through the western suburbs that made a mockery of all I had seen before.
A lesser occasion might have warranted a gift card or a trip to Chili's. But this is no mere birthday, briss, or quinceañera. It is a bachelor party. One for the ages. Alex will arrive as one person and leave as another. Indeed, he will be a better person—someone who has truly been through something significant, bearing the worn certainty of someone who ate a Portillo's Italian beef on the precipice of matrimony and stared into the void and found it delicious. Behold, the schedule.
Two cities. Five stops. Many hotdogs. One Alex.
You now know what's coming. We'll see you there.
— John
Best Man · Officiant of Chaos · Chairman of the Order of Order
P.S. The foam cowboy hats are not optional. This was decided without a vote.
The Office of the Best Man has received a number of questions in advance of the May 2nd proceedings. Many of these questions were reasonable. Some were not. All are addressed herein with the gravity and thoroughness they deserve. Please read carefully before submitting further inquiries, as The Office is operating at capacity.
From a Kantian perspective, this bachelor party presents immediate difficulties. Ask yourself: what if everyone, upon the occasion of their closest friend's impending marriage, simply dropped everything and committed fully to a day of escalating celebration on behalf of another person? The maxim cannot be universalized. Society would collapse. Nobody would go to work on Mondays. The postal service would cease to function. Kant would have been horrified, which is consistent with everything else we know about Kant.
The utilitarian calculus is similarly troubled. On one side of the ledger: the aggregate joy produced across an entire day, shared among a carefully curated group of people who genuinely like one another, on behalf of someone who deserves a good day. On the other: the cumulative disruption to the ordinary rhythms of a Saturday, the opportunity costs borne by an entire metropolitan area, and—if we are being honest with ourselves—the sheer tonnage of happiness concentrated in one place at one time, which cannot possibly be sustainable at a societal level. The math does not favor us. Bentham would have had concerns. Mill would have written about them at length.
Aristotle argued that eudaimonia is achieved through moderation, the golden mean, the careful balance between excess and deficiency. He called excessive indulgence a vice. He was, by all accounts, quite firm on this point. The Office of the Best Man has reviewed the itinerary against Aristotle's framework and found that five stops, culminating in an open-ended evening at a riverfront brewery, does not obviously constitute the golden mean. It constitutes something closer to the golden maximum. Aristotle did not have foam cowboy hats, but The Office suspects he would have had thoughts about them.
Finally, there's Nietzsche. Sweet, sweet Nietzsche. He argued that the highest human aspiration is the will to power—the relentless drive to overcome, to transcend, to become more than what one was. He also warned against Dionysian excess, the intoxicating chaos of pure revelry untempered by Apollonian reason and form. He believed that those who stare too long into the abyss risk becoming the abyss. He suffered a complete mental collapse at the age of 44. The Office of the Best Man draws no conclusions (though you certainly can). The Office merely notes that he never attended a bachelor party, and that this may have been the wisest decision he ever made.
The Office of the Best Man therefore concludes, reluctantly and on the basis of the foregoing analysis, that this party is ethically indefensible. We are going anyway. Chocolate cake shakes, y'all. Also, the hats have been procured.